Post by Dan Malachowski, Marketing Director THE NATIVE OPPORTUNITY Seventy percent of people want to learn about products/services through content, rather than ads (Inc. 2014). Most brands understand this, and they’ve increased their efforts in Content Marketing in recent years. According to Econsultancy, Content Marketing was the number one growth focus for companies in 2014, with 74 percent of brands boosting Content Marketing budget year-over-year. In fact, Content Marketing is now estimated to be a $135 billion global opportunity, with 27 million pieces of content shared online each day (WebDAM Solutions, NewsCred 2014). So this begs the question: How can my brand stand out amongst all this clutter to engage a relevant, content-hungry audience across today’s fragmented digital discovery and purchase path? At Performics, our Performance Content team creates and optimizes content for visibility in search, social and content networks. Achieving visibility for content—for example, in organic search—often requires a longer-term vision and strategy. But, in the shorter-term, native advertising is often a great way to quickly distribute fresh performance content and gain visibility in front of the right audience, at the right time, for the right price. Native advertising is thus performance media that is fueled by performance content. Native advertising is poised to explode in 2015. To illustrate, U.S. native ad spend is expected to grow 34.4 percent to $4.3 billion in 2015, according to eMarketer. The majority of this spend will be focused on social and native-style display: BEST PRACTICES for BRANDS Native advertising gives performance marketers the opportunity to extend content reach and attract new customers beyond traditional performance channels like paid search, the Google Display Network (GDN), ad exchanges or retargeting. But native advertising success depends upon a number of factors:

Content! In order to succeed in native advertising, you need a constant stream of engaging, timely content (that people will click on and share). This remains a concern for many brands; 44 percent identify content production as their biggest Content Marketing challenge (Oracle Eloqua, 2014). Many brands are now overcoming this obstacle by augmenting in-house content production with agencies (47 percent use an agency (Oracle Eloqua, 2014)).

Audience Targeting: One of the hallmarks of performance marketing is the ability to precisely engage target audiences (e.g. by keyword used, demographics, geo, device, browsing history, time-of-day, etc.). Precise targeting is also available in many native ad formats. However, this requires a deep understanding of your customer base: age, gender, interests, geo, sites they traffic. Native ads can only perform if they’re in front of the right audience.

Paid & Owned Alignment: Native advertising cannot be planned or activated in a silo. It needs to be part of a holistic strategy around the ad experience (e.g. the paid native ad) and the content (e.g. the landing page). How can we better set up landing page content to succeed? One way is to deliver more qualified and relevant customers to this content in the first place. This includes aligning content with ads, such as creating native ad headlines and descriptions that match landing pages.

Goals & Measurement: Your native advertising goals may differ from your paid search or regular display advertising goals. For instance, primary Content Marketing goals are often centered on the top funnel (e.g. demand/lead generation, lead nurturing and brand awareness) rather than the bottom funnel (conversions). According to Econsultancy, only 24 percent of marketers rate their company’s ability to measure ROI from content as “good” (as compared to 51 percent in paid search). Align goals with measurement to better quantify the impact of native advertising on your bottom line.

Format: The native ads match the visual design of the pages they live on, with the look and feel of organic content. For instance, Yahoo! Stream Ads are tightly woven into the content stream on users’ Yahoo! homepages and category pages (e.g. News, Sports, Finance, Health):

Pricing: Can be bought on a CPC-basis; impressions are an added benefit at no cost

Results: For one Performics client (over three months), we saw:

55% lower CPCs than Google Display Network (GDN)

186% higher click-through rates (CTR) vs. GDN

30% more clicks than GDN

51% more leads than GDN, resulting in a 16% higher conversion rate

Outbrain Amplify

Opportunity & Reach: Outbrain Amplify distributes content across the largest content publishers on the Web, including CNN.com, ESPN, Mashable, Fast Company and Slate

Format: Outbrain’s native ads are contextually linked to content within the native environment they live on. The content is often presented as “Promoted Stories,” “You May Also Like,” or “From Around the Web”:

Targeting: Content can be tailored by publisher and placement, and narrowed by DMA

Pricing: Can be bought on a CPC-basis; impressions are an added benefit at no cost

Results: In testing for a number of Performics CPG clients, Outbrain ads have driven large numbers of impressions with CTRs and clicks comparable to Yahoo! Stream Ads and higher than GDN

WHAT’S NEXT for NATIVE The native advertising space is quickly growing (and becoming more muddled). We expect new native opportunities on the horizon from networks like Microsoft. Many native opportunities align closely with performance marketing campaigns—in terms of pricing, bidding and targeting—and all brands should consider native as an additional channel to distribute performance content. For more information on Native Advertising best practices and opportunities, please contact your Performics Account Team today.

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